Tag Archives: scaffold

Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on how much has changed in the educational landscape and my own thinking since What Readers Really Docame out two and a half years ago. And having also spent some time last month working with Lucy West, Toni Cameron and the amazing team of math coaches that form the Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities, I want to share some new thoughts I’ve been having about the whole idea of scaffolding.

From what I could gather from a quick look at (yes, I admit it) Wikipedia, the idea of scaffolding goes back to the late 1950’s when the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner used it to describe young children’s language acquisition. And by the 1970’s Bruner’s idea of scaffolding became connected with Vygotsky’s concept of a child’s zone of proximal development and the idea that “what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.”

Even before the Common Core Standards, teachers have been encouraged to scaffold by using scaffolding moves like those listed below (which were culled from several websites):

Activating students’ prior knowledge

Introducing a text through a short summary or synopsis

Previewing a text through a picture walk

Teaching key vocabulary terms before reading

Creating a context for a text by filling in the gaps in students’ background knowledge

Offering a motivational context (such as visuals) to pique students interest or curiosity in the subject at hand

Breaking a complex task into easier, more “doable” steps to facilitate students achievement

Modeling the thought process of students through a think aloud

Offering hints or partial solutions to problems

Asking questions while reading to encourage deeper investigation of concepts

Modeling an activity for the students before they’re asked to complete the same or similar one

As I looked at in last year’s post on Common Core-aligned packaged programs, scaffolding these days has been ratcheted up even more, with teachers more or less being asked to do almost anything (including doing a think-aloud that virtually hands over the desired answer) to, in the words of one program, “guide students to recognize” and “be sure students understand” something specific in the text. And, for me, that raises the question: What is all that scaffolding really helping to erect or construct? Is it a strong, flexible and confident reader who’s able to independently understand all sorts of texts? Or is it a particular understanding of a particular text as demonstrated by some kind of written performance-based task product?

If we think about what’s left standing when the scaffolding is removed, it seems like we’re erecting the latter, not the former—though in What Readers Really Do, Dorothy Barnhouse and I attempted to change that by making a distinction between what we saw as a prompt and a scaffold, which can be seen in this chart from the book:

Most of the scaffolding moves listed above don’t, however, follow this distinction. Many solve the problems for the students and are also intended to lead students to the same conclusion—a.k.a. answer—as the teacher or the program has determined is right. I’m all for reclaiming or rehabilitating words, but given that the Common Core’s Six Shifts in Literacy clearly states that teachers should “provide appropriate and necessary scaffolding” (italics mine) so that students reading below grade level can close read complex texts, redefining the word scaffold may be a bit like Sisyphus trying to push that boulder uphill. So I’ve been thinking (and here’s where the math folks come in) about recasting the kinds of scaffolds Dorothy and I shared in our book as what my math colleagues call models.

Models in math are used not only as a way of solving a problem but of understanding the concepts beneath the math (which Grant Wiggins has just explored in a great “Granted, and. . . ” blog post). Here, for instance, are two models for multiplication: The first is a number line which shows how multiplication can be thought of as particular quantity of another quantity (in this case, three groups of five each), and the second the Box Method, or an open array, shows how large numbers can broken down into more familiar and manageable components and their products then added up. Each model is being used here to solve a particular problem, but each can be immediately transferred and applied to similar problems:

And here’s a text-based Know/Wonder chart that records the thinking of a class of 5th graders as they read the first chapter of Kate DiCamillo’s wonderful The Tiger Rising(and—sneak peak—will be appearing in my next book):

Like the math models, it references the specifics of a particular text, but it’s also a model for solving certain kinds of problems—in this case, how readers figure out what’s going on at the beginning of a complex texts and develop questions they can use as lines of inquiry as they keep reading. In effect, the chart makes visible what those students were “able to do in collaboration” that day that they’ll “be able to do independently tomorrow,” because, whether we call it a scaffold or a model, it’s directly and immediately transferrable to other texts that pose the same problem.

In the end I don’t think it really matters what we call this kind of support, but I do think we have to ask ourselves what, exactly, we’re scaffolding or modeling. Are we helping students get a particular answer to a particular problem or text in order to produce a particular assignment? Or are we, instead, really offering a replicable process of thinking that’s tied to the concepts of a discipline, which can start being transferred tomorrow not an at indeterminate point in the future? Of course, that raises the question of what the underlying concepts in reading are, which we don’t talk about as much as my math colleagues do for math. But that I’ll need to save for another day . . . .

Last week I raised some questions about text dependent questions, the instructional approach approved by the Common Core Standards authors, which many states and school districts are starting to adopt. Clearly I worry that this approach may decrease, not increase, students’ ability to truly become independent, as College and Career Ready Students should be, because the method hinges on us directing students to what we, from our own reading of a text, have determined to be important.

At its heart, the text dependent question approach seems to embrace the ‘straight road’ vision of reading that I looked at in my post on teaching uncertainty, with the questions acting as signposts that tell students what to pay attention to in order to reach a designated and pre-determined meaning. And it puts us, as teachers, back in the authoritative role of the “curator or gatekeeper of content,” as Randy Bomer puts it in his great book Time for Meaning, rather than in the role of a facilitator who’s, “less concerned with what students are supposed to get and more concerned with what the students can make with the materials they already have.”

This doesn’t, of course, mean that we shouldn’t ask questions. But if we truly want our students to be independent meaning makers, we need to think about what we’re asking and how we can craft questions that are open-ended enough for students to find their own way into a text and are framed in a way that makes them transferable from one text to another. And here’s where I think it’s useful to explore the difference between a prompt and a scaffold.

In What Readers Really Do, Dorothy Barnhouse and I spelled out what we see as the difference between the two in a chart that looks like this:

The question leads students to notice what the teacher (or in this case the Exemplar writer) has noticed and to draw the same conclusion from that detail that he or she did. It also anticipates what some students might miss (that this is, in fact, a slave narrative), and it seeks to ‘correct’ that by directing those students to the title in a way that solves a problem for the students rather than letting them solve it themselves as they keep on reading. The question also does nothing to teach the thinking around the text in a way that might be transferable to other similar texts, all of which makes it a prompt.

A scaffold, on the other hand, teaches the thinking around the text by offering students some instruction on how texts like this generally operate and what readers do because of that, along with a more open-ended invitation to notice what there is be noticed and consider what that might mean. That kind of scaffolded question, introduced by what I call a teaching point, could look and sound like this:

One of the things readers always do when they read a first-person narrative is to try to get a first impression of the narrator and his situation. And they do this by paying close attention to the details the narrator gives them in order to begin to get a sense of who he is and what’s going on with him. So take a look at these first few sentences. What kind of person might do and say the things that this narrator does? And what might we begin to understand about his situation from the details the narrator gives us?

Unlike the more tightly focused prompt which aims at a single answer, this scaffold might allow students to not only think about the world Douglass is describing but, depending on the details different students latched on to and what they made of them, to develop a first draft impression of Douglass as someone who’s industrious, persistent, generous or even crafty. They might also begin to question some of the assumptions they might have about slaves—such as slaves live only on plantations or slaves don’t speak to whites unless they’re spoken to—in a way that might position them to be more open to whatever Douglass might be saying overall about slavery. And they’d come away with a way of thinking they could apply and transfer to almost any first-person narrative they read.

Creating a scaffold instead of a prompt requires us to consider the knowledge and experience we have with texts and reading, which I believe we automatically—and often invisibly—draw on to make meaning of what we read. Then we teach to that underlying knowledge, sharing what we know about the act of reading and texts, rather than to the specific meaning we make of a given text. Thus we teach what we know about first-person narratives and the role that details play, not the particular importance of any single detail. (See “What We Knew by Heart: Turning Our Own Reading Practices into Curriculum” along with What Readers Really Do for more examples.)The scaffold method also means trusting that there’s more than one way to think deeply about a text and that students don’t need to catch every detail that we do.

Text-based Know/Wonder charts also act as scaffolds, and they’re always a good place to start as they’ll give you a sense of what students can do with a minimum of support. The teaching point behind them is that readers keep track of what they’re learning from a text while holding on to details and a slew of questions that they expect they’ll learn more about as they actively keep on reading. And this knowledge about what readers do yields the questions “What are you learning from the text?” and “What are you wondering about?”

All of this makes me think that the difference between a prompt and a scaffold is a bit like the old Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give a student a prompt and he feeds you an answer. Teach a student through a scaffold and you build a close reader—often for a lifetime.

To Make a Prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

ABOUT ME

Call me a literacy jack-of-all-trades: a reader, a writer, a teacher, a consultant, a passionate lover of language and books, and a true believer in the power of stories to affirm and transform our lives. Here I follow Dickinson’s advice and attempt to make something out of reverie, sharing thoughts, reflections, ruminations and musings about reading, writing, teaching and the ways those all impact life.

Search by Categories

A Word About Copyrights

To respect the rights of writers and photographers, I try to comply with all copyright laws. Many of the photographs on this site were taken by my partner D. A. Wagner and appear here with his permission. Others have been purchased as micro stock with a license to use here. When unable to purchase an image or contact the photographer for permission, I've linked the image back to its source site to acknowledge and give credit to the photographer.

Excerpts of text appear under the copyright law's fair use provision for educational purposes. Again all attempts have been made to link them back to their author, their publisher or amazon. Questions or oversights regarding copyrights will be promptly addressed. And visitors to this site are kindly asked not to swipe images without contacting me first.